Poetry and a Drawing

This sketch is a kokeshi (a limbless Japanese doll). I was kind of foggy-brained in church today and thought about drawing this.

Didn’t sleep much at all last night. I am a bit of an insomniac and perhaps I was subconsciously preoccupied with some plans we had for people to come over today. I don’t know. My eyes feel so grainy and dry and my muscles are achy. I have been thinking about this poem by Sylvia Plath and thought it would be appropos for today’s blog post. The third paragraph/verse/stanza is my favorite part – I have a vivid fear of taking sleeping pills as I worry about becoming tolerant of and dependent on them, but sometimes I get sick and take Nyquil and I must confess… the heavy sleep is delicious. (Don’t laugh at me. It’s not nice.)

Insomniac

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole —
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments–the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue —
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

-Sylvia Plath

This is the one I have- it was a gift from a student. I didn't intentionally copy it when I made my sketch.

Some stuff about me and my blog:

Link to anything I post if you'd like, but pretty please do me a favor and leave the pictures here. :) Thanks!

Giuseppi made his name. It took forever.

Featured Artist

Giuseppi Giraffe
My first featured artist will be a personal favorite. This young giraffe has accomplished many great works of greatness and makes an excellent placeholder until I decide who's going to go in this spot in his place.
Here he is pictured with one of his mosaics. If you squint, you can see it's his name.